I don't think I could have tackled 'The Pura Principle' until now. It takes me about twenty years to come to term with any difficult period in my life, to get enough of a grasp on it to fictionalize it.

Stereotypes, they're sensual, cultural weapons. That's the way that we attack people. At an artistic level, stereotypes are terrible writing.

Every single immigrant we have, undocumented or documented, is a future American. That's just the truth of it.

Colleagues are a wonderful thing - but mentors, that's where the real work gets done.

I suppose for a very long time I've been trying to understand how it is that people might make sense out of their lives and make meaning and make their lives meaningful in the face of the trouble that life brings.

I don't understand women who try to be glamour queens.

I don't understand why it has to be either - or - either socialism or democracy. Why can't we combine things to get the best of each system?

I don't understand why it has to be either - or - either socialism or democracy. Why can't we combine things to get the best of each system?

The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up.

Did you ever think, Clarice, why the Philistines don't understand you? It's because you are the answer to Samson's riddle. You are the honey in the lion.

God will give you anything as long as you understand that he is the primary and not the secondary.

I believe the U.S. already understands and will understand more and more that only a strong Russia will respond to the genuine interests of the United States.

The greatest gift I can give is to see, hear, understand, and touch another person.

He found himself understanding the wearisomeness of this life, where every path was an improvisation and a considerable part of one's waking life was spent watching one's feet.

To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.

For what the horse does under compulsion, as Simon also observes, is done without understanding; and there is no beauty in it either, any more than if one should whip and spur a dancer.

Understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest.

Not to understand is profound; to understand is shallow. Not to understand is to be on the inside; to understand is to be on the outside.

“Human understanding more easily invents new things than new words.”

“though the interest of the labourer is strictly connected with that of the society, he is incapable either of comprehending that interest, or of understanding its connexion with his own. His condition leaves him no time to receive the necessary information, and his education and habits are commonly such as to render him unfit to judge, even though he was fully informed. In the public deliberations, therefore, his voice is little heard, and less regarded; except upon particular occasions, when his clamour is animated, set on, and supported by his employers, not for his, but their own particular purposes.”

“The desire to know and to understand are themselves conative, i.e., have a striving character, and are as much personality needs as the "basic needs" we have already discussed.”

"I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing."